


ready to comply

by whitchry9



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes's Trigger Words, Gen, I love that it's a tag, Memories, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 09:03:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8366359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitchry9/pseuds/whitchry9
Summary: They stir something in him, besides obedience.





	

Longing.

He is sure he had emotions once, things that he felt, other than pain, which even now, is only distant, something that distracts from the mission, but doesn’t prevent him from completing it. (Nothing prevents him from completing the mission, short of his death. Sometimes he’s not sure that’s a bad thing.)

 

Rusted.

The arm is not always awful. He recognizes its usefulness, especially during a mission. If he is nothing more than a weapon, it is a fitting extension of him.

Of course, there are drawbacks. (Eternal ache, the cold, the never-ending sense that it isn’t right.) It rusted, at first, blood and melting ice and rain from spending days and nights waiting for targets.

(They fixed it after that, so it was the strongest part of him.)

 

Seventeen.

He doesn’t seem to age, or maybe he just doesn’t experience time the same way other people do. It seems like the people around him get older, and he stays the same. Eternal, like Russia’s winter.

And yet, he feels like he was young once. He has a distinct memory of a cake, of a present, of someone telling him to blow out the candles.

Or maybe it was just a dream.

 

Daybreak.

He gets the sense that all of the scraps of memories, images in his mind, are supposed to make sense, that he is just one day away from piecing them together and understanding what they mean, but it seems like every time he gets closer, another one slips away.

Maybe some things can only be understood in the dead of night, not when the sun appears.

 

Furnace.

He always seems to be cold, perhaps yet another way he is just like Russia’s winter. Maybe he is supposed to be that way, yet another thing to never distract from the mission.

But he remembers being warm.

 

Nine.

A bloody nose, a split lip, the smell of garbage and unrelenting heat. A small boy, blond and stupid.

He doesn’t know what this means, if it happened. Yet, he feels like there is fondness towards the boy, his tiny fists held up and his teeth bared, bloody from his mouth. The boy is young, and yet perhaps, so is he.

 

Benign.

He has the growing sense that things are wrong. That he was not meant to be a weapon. (Can weapons have feelings?) There is a whisper that he is good, that he has to stand up for himself, that there is still something worth saving.

The thoughts disappear with the next orders, as quickly as they appear.

It’s probably fine.

 

Homecoming.

There are flashes of an exhausted and victorious march, the triumphant return from a point assumed would be the last. He can’t remember ever being triumphant or greeted warmly. After a mission, there is only the next one, and if he’s lucky, a debrief where he isn’t told that he failed, and a return to a place that has never felt like home, if such a place existed.

 

One.

There is no other like him, the weapon, the asset. (He must have had a name at some point, surely. People have names, don’t they? He doesn’t dwell on the idea that maybe he is not a person.)

He thinks it would be lonely, if he felt anything.

 

Freight Car.

He remembers a train once. A fight. Having someone’s back.

(It doesn’t make sense, since there would be no reason for him to do that, and yet he is certain that is what happened.)

An explosion, hanging on, a fall.

Nothing.

 


End file.
